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Denice Frohman was Beacon’s point guard for the past four years. She graduated in June, and now she’s at UMass Lowell, playing for them. Denice’s recruiting process was a long, crazy one, but it ended well, and she’s happy now at school.

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Will Richardson has this article about how the press corps allowed themselves to become the public relationship department for the White House. Here’s a quote from Rick McArthur, the publisher of Harper’s, who states:

The remarkable thing about it is the press  the White House press corps anyway, has now turned into has turned to full time press agency for the President of the United States. The proper thing to do in this case is to refuse the secrecy agreement and say we’re not going to be participants in a photo opportunity, which is merely done to help your re-election campaign, and if that aborts the trip, well, it aborts the trip.

Required reading on a day when Beacon showed Wag the Dog and had someone from FAIR lead a discussion on it afterwards.

Someone remind the press about that silly little idea about "The Fourth Estate" and all… please?

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Why? Because I love it when my kids have email addresses like CaptainFrsb@isp.com or BlueDemons33@isp.com or lilbluedemon@isp.com or VeganBigDawg11@isp.com. I really do love it when my students love the stuff we do together as much as I do.

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I wanted to extend a warm welcome to the world of blogging to Ashley Brichter, Beacon sophmore, captain of the girls Ultimate team and all-around nifty person!

So this got me to thinking (and since I’m putting off grading logs…), so far, I think much of what is cool about Beacon-blogging is how it’s building community. I love what Kate is doing in her New Media classes, and what Mary is doing in Social Justice, and despite myself, I think the kids are doing cool stuff in my New Media class… but I also admit that I love reading Zana’s and Jeremy’s and Jessie’s and Kate’s personal blogs. And here’s what I’d love to explore… or get comments on… does it make a difference when kids blog on a school site as opposed to just getting LiveJournal or another blog? For my money, I think it does. I think that writing for a school community does change the writing — probably for good and bad, honestly — but I like that, as a school, we now have a tool to encourage writing and community for kids. It’s one more thing that I hope makes Beacon more of a community that kids want to take part in. And I do think that it won’t take long for the blogging to make its way from the personal blogs into the classrooms more and more. I know Alison Tolpin wants a blog… and I need to follow Will R.’s example and set up the newspaper with a niftier layout that they want to use.

Comments? Thoughts?

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Yes folks, Beacon’s co-founder and former director, Ruth Lacey has been profiled in today’s New York Times. I think it’s a really well-done piece, and for anyone who knows Ruth, you can really hear her voice in her quotes, which is rather cool.

I admit that reading it made me sad that Ruth isn’t here anymore. She is one of the folks who really take primary responsibility for making Beacon such a wonderful place, and we miss her presence. And I do hope that someone at Tweed reads that piece and thinks about how a brilliant career public-school educator is now able to focus on education, rather than deal with all of the insanity of public education.

Public education lost a brilliant educator when Ruth went to Columbia. It’s an amazing opportunity for her, but it’s also a great opportunity for those of us in pubilc education to think about what it takes to keep us here.

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O.k. — I admit, I’m due for a long piece of writing here, but for the time being, I’ve got to get some homework logs graded, write up a summary piece for a grad school class, and figure out how I’m going to teach the next text for both English classes, so I’m just going to post some interesting links I’ve found in catching up with blogging:

(Oh… and in the wonderful world of bloggers everywhere… my father just found my blog and found a way to introduce it into conversation last night. Very funny, Dad.)

From Will Richardson comes a cool post in his journalism class where students sound off about blogging. If I felt like I had done a better job in using the blogs in my New Media class, I think I could spark some really cool meta-discussions about it… but we’ll see. I’m still not happy with how I’ve set that up as sort of a "when you aren’t working on your movie, blog…" kind of activity.

Not only does my blog allow me to vent about the stuff going on in my life but it also makes me laugh out loud. Only at Beacon would my English teacher, My advisor, and my friends post on a blog. I mean an online journal is something very personal (and geeky) and at Beacon to have the this sort of openness that can go from joking to serious and back again while not fearing anything from inside or outside Beacon.

And it just reenforces my beliefs about how blogs and forums and such can really build the bricks-and-mortar communities that schools have. I still love that alumni write on our forums… and keep blogs… and visit…

Anyway… just thought it’d be cool to post some testimony from one of the kids.

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I was reading Zana’s Weblog, and she shows a picture of her interview with Taylor Mali, the teacher-turned-slam-poet. So, intrigued by her worship of Taylor Mali, I hop over to his site, where I find out that his manifest is to create 1,000 new teachers by 2006. Rock on, Mr. Mali.

He has several really amazing pieces of work up on his site, but in honor of Jessie and Zana and Yael and all the Beacon students who have felt the need and found the voice to speak in a declarative voice, I wanted to post this one. I hope you enjoy it. And thanks, Zana.

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So… I wake up Saturday morning, and I cannot connect to Beacon. I start poking around, trying to figure out what’s wrong when Danny calls me, and he cannot log into Beacon.

I find out from a student via AIM that they can. I then route my way to Beacon by ssh-ing in from another account. (Thank you, altschools.) Danny and I fear the worst… someone is messing with us… someone has hacked us… someone has hacked our firewall and blocked Danny and myself. You can imagine.

Six hours later, we get it confirmed that Road Runner’s routing is messed up, and they are the reason that Beacon people all up and down the West Side of Manhattan cannot log in.

About two hours ago, I was able to get back on.

I had time to write a long blog entry. Instead, I just spent a bunch of time reading the Beacon forums that all the other folks were writing this weekend, uploading all the work I wrote offline, and now I’m off to bed.

Sorry about the lack of blogs… going to try to get back in the swing of things this week.